Seqwater supplies drinking water to 3.2 million people in South East Queensland from a network of 39 water treatment plants that draw water from the region’s waterways and storages. To ensure optimal water quality, the Drinking Water Quality Team travels throughout the region’s catchments performing on-site sanitary surveys to assess the risk of microbial hazards (e.g. from agricultural, industrial and septic sources) to adjacent waterways.

Historically, the team generated lengthy reports to turn the data collected into risk assessments that could be provided to treatment plant operators so they could mitigate the risks from the hazards. But these reports took months to generate, by which time it could be too late to employ adequate risk mitigation.

The team at Seqwater needed a way to assess their survey results and provide information to treatment plant operators in a way that is timely enough to ensure insights are actionable. They also wanted better visibility into where they had performed surveys to support planning for their annual survey schedule.

What we delivered

We created the Sanitary Survey Explorer, a bespoke, interactive, web-based dashboard, which allows the Seqwater team to explore the data they collate. The Explorer connects to Seqwater’s internal ArcGIS servers to give a near real-time data view of the risks across the catchment.

Users can explore risk at individual sites through time, using the map user interface, viewing visualisations of aggregated results, as well as being able to drill down to the data for each survey conducted. To provide more broad landscape-based assessments there is a catchment view of particular use to water treatment plant operators. The catchment risk view calculates the cumulative highest risk from all microbial hazards (E. coli, Protozoa, Chemical) upstream of a treatment plant.